Know-How Exchange : Strategy

"Ideas" are worth absolutely nothing unless you demonstrate that someone wants to pay for them. The idea has to be the solution to a problem that is recognized and causes a lot of pain for your target consumer. How you prove this is through testimonials concerning the extent of the problem and how well your idea addresses the problem. The more "real" your idea is, the better. If you can prototype it and get doctors to use it and then give you testimonials, this presents a strong reason to believe in the commercial viability of the idea.

How you protect your idea is through patenting the idea before you begin disclosing it to anyone. You may want to consider patenting in more than one country. This is more expensive, but will protect your idea better. As you begin talking with others, you also will want to have people sign non-disclosure agreements.

As far as getting in tough with manufactures, having an existing company pick up someone's idea is very difficult. Most companies won't even talk to someone because once they do, if they were to EVER come out with a similar product, they would be open to a law suit. And a "little guy" suing a "big guy" usually will be biased against the big guy because people think big corporations are naturally evil. Your best bet is to develop your market yourself into a good niche. When you show viability and become noticeable to the companies who you would like to target, they will come to you.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Until you demonstrate this by doing some market research, your idea has no value. Here's an example: I have an idea for a write-only memory. It holds BILLIONS and BILLIONS of megabytes of data and it's the size of the head of a pin! It uses organic technology and it actually grows as long if you only add water. You can cut it off with a pair of scissors and use saliva to attach it to the computer. As time goes on, it continues to grow so you have more and more write-only memory. You can write and write and write data to it forever and it never fills up! Sounds like a wonderful product, right? It's probably worth ga-zillions of dollars! Only two problems...I've never been able to actually make one that works and once the data is written to the memory, you can't actually retrieve it. It's write-only. I'm pretty sure, even as wonderful as the idea is, that it's not worth anything because no one will actually buy it.

My point about "value" is that it's the market who determines the value, not the person who has the idea. Taking an idea to market costs money. Even protecting it takes money. Unless you have it already, then you are going to want to convince potential investors that the idea has merit. Merit means commercial viability - people have an unsatisfied need or are experiencing pain because your idea doesn't exist as a product. Certainly, you might get friends and family to throw cash your way solely based on your say-so and enthusiasm. But absolutely no sophisticated investors will buy into your idea without a modicom of proof that enough people will actually buy it for a price that generates lots of cash flow and profit. And no existing company who manufactures an industry related product will pay much attention to your idea without proof it really works and many people will pay a price for it that generates cash flow and profit.

Yes, protect the idea so you can go talk to people and understand if the idea really addresses an unsatisfied need or a pain and that someone will actually pay money to address that need or pain.

Wayde

You’ve got some good offers of assistance here from people who know what they are on about.

I would caution you to personally attend to two bits of vital reading to give yourself an understanding of the hurdles you will need to overcome concerning the manufacture, marketing and sales of medical devices.

You ideas as a surgeon will lead to ideas which will, you hope, if designed correctly and manufactured accordingly solve certain orthopaedic problems.

To retain ownership of the ideas, if they are truly novel, you need to attend to patenting the concept and doing so in some detail.

If you want anyone to believe you, you will need to conduct trials on the prototypes and publish the findings a peer reviewed learned journal.

You will need to find a manufacturing partner who will take some up-front risk and produce a batch of equipment for a wider trial – if you want it to undergo clinical trials, even the ones specified by the European medical Devices Directorate and the relevant American standards – the originators of these standards are as follows:

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), ASTM International, British Standards Institute (BSI), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

Once you’ve got past the requirements of these standards, you can then, in conjunction with your partners proceed to mass manufacturing and marketing the devices.

Not surprisingly, the original design you have conceived will probably be subject to many revisions in the course of this process and in order to keep your stake in the venture, you will need to ensure that you have frames a suitable contract about three stages back!

Good luck – it’s hard work and I have steered a couple of products through this morass, but in 2009 the road is longer, the hurdles higher and the process is more expensive – hopefully on the pockets of your development and manufacturing partners. If your idea is novel, viable and beneficial, they will gladly put up with this as it affects every single thing that they make.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt

PS Who says we do this only for points!